Titus Andronicus, the least known but the most notorious play in the Shakespearean canon, was given performance to-night for the first time in Stratford-on-Avon's history. It Is a magnificent production. People seemed half to be expecting a "horror comic" for the ghastly details of the story – rape, mutilation, and cannibalism – seemed impossible, on paper, to take quite seriously. In the event, tonight's audience found the final heaped-up carnage and the episode of the illegitimate black child a little too much on the laughable side of horror. Yet, for the better part, they saw a tremendous Elizabethan box-office success given its true size and an explicable popularity.

Peter Brook, who is responsible for sound, for stage pictures and for direction, has produced the play with dazzling simplicity out of a terrifying tawny darkness. The horrors were not laid on crudely. There was little running gore, and only the lopping of Titus's hand is really sickening. But the murderous spirit of the piece is marvellously caught with the shadows and the harsh shapes.

Sir Laurence Olivier begins the much-wronged Titus on an almost jovial note, then rising like an Elizabethan Oedipus to the scene where, confronted with his lopped and ravished daughter Lavinia, he has his own hand amputated, and going on superbly through the scenes of feigned madness to the final Barmicides's Feast. As that "map of woe" Lavinia, Vivien Leigh is a striking picture of silent reproach. Maxine Audley attacks the tigerish Tamora with splendid style. Anthony Quayle as her evil genius and Alan Webb and Michael Denison as noble Romans are forthright as the play demands. But it is Sir Laurence's mouth, like a mask of tragedy itself, howling in horrid grief, which we shall remember, and Mr Brook's brilliant conception of a piece which, however horrible, is well worth enduring once in a while like this.